Thursday, January 30, 2014

Best Lineup - San Francisco Giants

Next up on my look at each teams most efficient lineup is the San Francisco Giants. In this exercise the methodology is to use my simulator to find out which lineup wins the most games vs RH and LH pitchers. I do this by making the team of interest the "away" team, playing against a "make believe" team whose stats don't change from one sim to the next. In fact no stats (or input projections) change for either team, the only difference from one simulation to the next is the lineup of the team of interest. For player projections, I am using Steamer projections which are available on Fangraphs. The lineup results will only be as good as the projections. I am not a subject matter expert on every teams personnel but I try to use MLBDepthcharts as a guidance as to which players are starters and I tend to avoid hitting too many LH back to back when reasonably possible. Keep in mind, the results are not intended to match what a certain teams manager is most likely to do during the season.

Skinny: The first thing that stands out here is that the most likely lineup put out by MLBDepthCharts matches the best lineup vs LHP per the simulator. This rarely happens, so that is interesting. When it comes to facing a RHP the simulator wants some changes. The simulator places Brandon Crawford in the leadoff spot and moves Angel Pagan, who has more speed, to the second spot. Pablo Sandoval moves up to third dropping Brandon Belt down to fifth and Pence down one spot to sixth. The one constant here is that Buster Posey should bat cleanup. With Crawford moving up to the top of the lineup, Marco Scutaro drops down to seventh and is followed by Michael Morse who is a bottom of the order hitter no matter what.